Anonymous Monk has asked for the
wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi Monks.

The college I attend finally installed perl on the campus wide network, but we are not allowed to install *any* software that accesses the registry of a campus machine. Since I would like to use one of the CPAN graphics modules for a course presentation, is there a way to download a module and store it in another directory? Each student has been granted a relatively small (10MB if I recall correctly) folder for keeping various documents, files, etc. Could I place a module there then use something like

use lib(...);

to use the module? If so, what, specifically, would I need to do in order for my program to see and use the module?

Yes, you can. Exactly how easy it will be depends on which module. A pure Perl one should just be a matter of downloading the pm file, saving it with an appropriate name (e.g. for module Foo::Bar, use filename "C:\MyStuff\lib\Foo\Bar.pm") and then including the following at the top of your script:

Can you use a sneakernet virus vector thumb drive? You could use a portable perl installation on that drive (strawberry, dwimperl, activestate (IIRC) can all be configured or come by default as portable installs), along with your desired libraries, and make your presentation from there.

One benefit from this setup is you are not limited to the 10MB limit, and you have the possibility of it still working even when (note that I didn't say if) the network fails in the middle of your presentation. This is assuming, of course, that you are able to use a thumb drive on those machines.

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
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